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Wednesday, 13 January 2016

The fiction of NHS inefficiency

Yesterday I saw someone ranting beneath one of my Facebook posts about how they consider the NHS to be "broken", and how it has "been that way for decades".
With the drip, drip, drip of anti-NHS stories in the right-wing press it's easy to see how people might have become convinced that the NHS is a catastrophically inefficient mess, but the evidence actually says that it is not.
EfficiencyThere is a mountain of evidence to show that the NHS is still (somehow) one of the most efficient health care systems in the world (despite years of Tory mismanagement and Andrew Lansley's catastrophic reforms that even top Tories admit to being "unintelligible gobeldygook"), and it's still vastly more efficient than the private sector dominated US health system.

According to the 2014 Commonwealth Fund study the NHS ranked as number one in almost every category in comparison to the heath systems of ten other developed nations (Australia, Canada, France, Germany, Netherlands, New Zealand, Norway, Sweden, Switzerland and the US).Meanwhile the 2013 World Bank figures reveal that the UK spent significantly less per head of population on health care provision ($3,598) than all ten of the other countries in the Commonwealth Fund analysis (New Zealand $4,063, France $4,804, Germany $5,006, Sweden $5,680, Canada $5,718, Australia $6,110, US $9,146, Switzerland $9,276, Norway $9,715).How is it possible that the NHS could have been ranked as one of the best services in the developed world and also as one of the cheapest too, yet be the "catastrophically inefficient failing monstrosity" that certain right-wing elements would like you to believe that it is?

Isn't the fact that the NHS is ranked as both better and cheaper than the health services in so many other developed nations an indicator that it's actually incredibly efficient by global standards?The NHS is oursThe NHS is ours. It's ours because we have paid for it through our taxes. The NHS was founded in 1948 and inspired socialised heath care systems across the social democratic countries of the world, the introduction of the NHS coincided with a massive upsurge in the health of the nation, and the NHS is still demonstrably one of the most efficient health care systems on the planet too.

There have always been elements within the Tory party who have hated the concept of socialised health care with a burning ideological passion. In their view the NHS is an abomination; an impediment to their fantasy free-trade utopia, so it simply has to be done away with. It astounds me that anyone could seriously believe the Tories to be responsible custodians of a socialised health care system.The sad thing is though that some people have allowed their opinions to be poisoned by the drip, drip, drip of misinformation from hacks employed by the likes of Rupert Murdoch and Jonathan Harmsworth. Some people allow themselves to believe that the NHS is catastrophically inefficient and desperately in need of reform, and that large scale privatisation is the solution, when in reality it so clearly is not catastrophically inefficient nor in need of further privatisation into the hands of private health interests, many of which have contributed directly to Tory party coffers.

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